Collectanea Essays Addresses And Reviews Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from Essays, Reviews, and Addresses, Vol. 4: Academical: Religious Religion, thus discharged from its hold on reality and reduced to the category of Symbol, is dislodged from its seat as the Supporting postulate of all the Sciences, and takes its place among the F ine Arts to be treated, by writers on the Belles Lettres, among the varieties of rhetorical trope and metaphor and personification, the literal base of which is always found in some aéstractz'on mentally distilled from concrete experience. Hence it is that philosophers and critics who touch upon the subject spend a curious ingenuity in substituting neuter abstracts for the ancient personal names of the Living God. To them, the t/zing denoted is 'the Infinite, ' 'the Eternal, ' 'the Unknowable, ' 'the stream of Tendency, ' The aggregate of Umizangeable Law'; and no longer the Creator and Inspirer' of men, the Father in heaven, ' the Judge of all the earth, ' the Holy One, ' the Searcher of hearts.' To me, I confess, Religion, -in its very essence, is a conscious relation between the human Personality and the Divine: and had I, from change of conviction, to relinquish this relation as imaginary, I should feel bound to surrender the vocabulary of religion to those who retained this essence, and to make the best I could of the unsanctified Ethics that remained. Respect for the vera cities of language would forbid me, by misuse of terms, to wear as a mask a cast of features no longer rendering the expression of my own. The criticisms which are applied to others in one or two of the following Addresses I should feel that I had justly brought upon myself, if to the dwarfed and altered thought I had tried to shrink the grand old language. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.